How Professional Staffing Firms Can Transform Marketing Spend into ROI

Despite a minor recent uptick, recruiting and staffing firms face a challenging market with fewer placements & stagnating revenue. In response to soft demand, some are opting to slash marketing budgets entirely. This, in my view, is a mistake.

Remember just two years ago: staffing requirements were flowing in, fee agreements easier to obtain. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back. If you strategically deploy marketing resources now, you’ll be well positioned when the ice breaks and budgets unfreeze. If not, you’ll fall behind.

When budgets are tight, the trick is to control marketing spend, not eliminate it. This means identifying and prioritizing activities that maximize your ROI. As a full-stack marketing agency for recruiting and staffing firms, here’s what echogravity typically recommends to our clients.

Why eyeballs are part of your marketing ROI

$7 million. That’s the going rate for a thirty-second Super Bowl ad placement. With such a large investment, you have to ask: how do companies track the ROI of a Super Bowl ad?

According to Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, chief marketing officer at DoorDash: “It’s about building a long-running narrative.” The ROI doesn’t come from immediate sales, but from heightened awareness that sets the stage for down funnel campaigns. You don’t have to drop seven figures on an ad spot to apply the same principle to your staffing agency:

Awareness is necessary to drive sales. Getting eyeballs isn’t just a leading indicator of your ROI—it’s part of your ROI.

Of course, we all understand this intuitively. Agencies will spend without question on client dinners, event sponsorships, golf outings, etc. Why? Because we know relationship-building matters. If you don’t put yourself out there, no one knows who you are, and your pipeline risks drying up.

But it’s a far leap from intuition to hard, cold data. Directly correlating every awareness-level marketing activity to a specific deal or set of deals is costly, complex, and ambiguous. So most agencies don’t bother, opting instead to fly blind.

This is all well and good when business is booming and you can afford to spend indiscriminately. But when budgets tighten and freeze, you have to make hard choices. If you don’t know which activities are the most impactful, you risk cutting investment into your highest ROI activities.

So what’s the path out of this rock and hard place? The answer: eyeballs. Focus on where your lead’s eyeballs go along their path to “Closed – Won.” Then tally the total cost of all those assets and divide it by the portion of the deal best attributed to marketing.

Let’s illustrate this with an example of a 30-day sales cycle. For the sake of argument (and simplicity), we’ll assume you can track this lead’s engagement with a set of published content, and they follow a linear journey from marketing → sales:

Content Consumed	Marketing Spend	Day in Funnel
Social post	$100	1
Blog post	$500	3
Blog post	$500	10
Webinar	$2,500	15 – Hand-off to Sales
eBook	$1,500	21
Email Campaign	$500	30 – Closed Won

So, if you land one client that has five openings at $100/hr, and assuming the gross margin is 25%, this equates to roughly $25,000 in total gross margin for ONE placement. If you are able to fill the other positions, the ROI increases 5X for each placement.  ROI can be calculated as such:

You can also apply this method to existing customers, tracking the content they consume over the course of their engagement, then track that against more job orders or placements with other hiring managers of the organization.

Regardless of the exact models you use, remember: if you want to attract leads, you have to attract their attention. This requires developing compelling content they’ll want to read and engage with. Those eyeballs, over time, will lay the groundwork for future deals.

How we recommend allocating your marketing budget to maximize ROI

You only get out of marketing what you put in. If you expect to generate $50,000 contracts, you’ll need appropriately compelling and high-value content to attract businesses willing to spend that much.

At echogravity, we recommend a three-step approach to allocating marketing budget:

1. Calculate your budget based on what peers and competitors are spending or the standard 7-11% of annual revenue
2. Prioritize your marketing spend based on the objectives determined above (typically a mix of short-term quick wins and long-term, high-value campaigns)
3. Optimize your spend by choosing tasks that reduce spend without sacrificing outcomes (e.g. hiring an agency vs. full-time employee)

As to where those marketing dollars go, there are specific buckets every organization needs. I like to think of these in terms of sports. If you’re playing football, you need 11 on the field. Baseball, you need nine. And marketers need their own “team,” which consists of the following elements.

People

There are certain skill sets you need on board to launch an effective marketing campaign. Generally, these fall into the following buckets:

• Creatives—designers, copywriters, videographers, web developers, etc. to build your marketing assets
• Technologists—people experienced in building workflows, optimizing web performance, automating and integrating, etc.
• Project managers—these people own individual campaigns and are generally responsible for deploying assets to the appropriate channels
• Campaign managers —these people not only capture and organize data to understand your ideal customer profile, but also to analyze campaign performance
• Strategists—these people make key decisions on all facets of your marketing to ensure optimal structure and performance

Process

No marketing success happens by accident. A lot happens behind the scenes that never sees the light of day. Once you have the right people or agency on board, you need clear processes to ensure every activity aligns with and contributes to your marketing goals. Some of the most critical processes include:

• Asset creation, feedback, & approval
• Data capture and analysis
• Customer workflows (inbound and outbound)
• Technology integration
• Access levels & approval authority
• SLAs between marketing and sales for lead handoff

Technology

Modern marketing teams require certain technologies to operate effectively. Here are some that are table stakes for teams of all sizes:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Content management system (CMS)
• Web analytics
• Lead capture, routing, and scheduling
• Marketing automation
• Email marketing
• Social media management

Data

Marketing rises and falls by the data at its disposal. Especially when users expect increasingly personalized communications, you need a variety of data to understand your customers, message and position accordingly, and target the right people.

• First-party data (captured from inbound forms, sales research, etc.)
• Third-party data (to enrich leads)
• Intent data (first- and third-party)
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel performance data—e.g. traffic, engagement

Why now is the perfect time work on optimizing your marketing ROI

When deciding how much to spend on marketing, don’t just ask yourself what outcome will we drive now? So many factors may hinder your ability to realize an outsized return in this tight market. Ask yourself instead: how are we preparing for when the dam bursts and budgets open back up?

The ones who invest in building their marketing infrastructure, generating brand awareness, and building relationships with potential customers and partners will be the first ones people call when people are ready to hire again.

So don’t wait for the market to turn—be ready when it does!

Get in touch with us now and turn your marketing spend into measurable success!